


Like the Sky Finds the Clouds

by GennenFo



Category: Doug Dug
Genre: Fantasy, Multi, mobile gaming, video games - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27067627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GennenFo/pseuds/GennenFo
Summary: A lonely miner’s son ventures out of his comfort zone— and into danger— to help someone he loves.
Kudos: 2





	Like the Sky Finds the Clouds

Liss had no desire to dig.

Nights, when his sister Helen lay like the dead, exhausted from another double spent in the mines, and his mother Dierdre lay, as if to enchant the dead and invite them back, or else to invite herself over, and his father Ansel likewise lay, dead as the earth he was wrapped in his whole life, dead as the gray moonstone above his head— the moonstone, unpolished and the size of a newborn calf, which Helen freed by her own strength and hauled from the very same mines with the help of two seasoned oxen— Liss snatched the wood-handled oil lamp and crept to the overflow shed, where he just had room on the old workbench to light the place so he could for an hour or so strum the guitbox he had picked up from the May sisters in exchange for a hand-sized bag of copper coins. Nothing fancy by anyone’s standard, the playing, which is why he kept it so remote, but by the time Hera the Star of Relief resurfaced in the peach blossom of the eastern summer sky, about two months after the purchase, he had composed a song he thought well enough of that he considered playing it for his secret love as soon as— at or least sometime after— the Bader family caravan finally returned from the annual, season-long jewelstone tour.

Days he cobbled shoes.

Mostly the heavy-toed work boots of the metalworkers and the lingering miners, but his skill was versatile, and he sometimes handled even the dainty dancing shoes for the teenagers whose parents refused to buy a new pair every time the style changed, the teenagers who stared at him in disbelief when he told them it might take a week before they were ready. The detail of the work suited him.

His own shoes were not in enviable shape, however; between business and music— and the hours he spent each day caring for his family home and the ailing Dierdre— his bulging leather waffle stompers had become worn and badly stained along the bottom by the freshly cut grass he passed through going to and from the overflow shed.

The evening he eased into those boots for the last time, his mind was in two places. The Bader family had sent word that they would pull into town perhaps an hour or two after sunset, and there was always an extensive welcome party, initially made of friends and extended family who wanted to uncork a barrel of Badby honey wine in celebration, if only to endear themselves to Anita Bader, former president of the Miners’ Guild, who still held power in the minds of the townspeople and who still doled out favors when it suited her, but which was now more often comprised of a majority of townsfolk. The event was large enough that Liss could blend in, just be there to see the changes the summer weather had wrought: the noticeably longer hair, the shoulder freckles glowing like coals. And always some exotic outfit custom-made on the shores of Laird. He’d hoped to see it all while he continued mustering the courage to introduce himself. As for playing his song, he imagined the right opportunity would bloom out of their meeting, somehow.

But his mind was also on the task at hand. Helen was as reliable a sister as Liss could have wanted. She worked six agonizing days a week down in the mine, and it wasn’t the mining work of their grandparents’ generation, the generation who labored under the the DragonPath banner, simply dropping in a few sticks of explosives and then team-shoveling the payload into an elevator cart all day. DP had closed its local branch decades ago— when Ansel was still a rowdy young man and Dierdre a sharp spitfire, when Liss and Helen were still small enough to cuddle in the dewy dusk before a fire pit— once it became clear that they had effectively sucked out the marrow of the principal shaft and that more profitable veins existed to the south. For all her evenness, though, once or twice a season, her evening commute would include a detour to the Caboose, the east side bar she and Ansel once frequented together after rough shifts, an oat beer for each followed by a proud walk home. These days, if she wound up there, she almost never left of her own accord. She liked stronger drinks now, and more of them, and it would take Liss showing up— to peel her out of her booth or, once, to wedge himself between her and a townie who’d gotten as angry about something of his own as she had about Ansel— to talk her out of there.

And when she didn’t show for dinner that evening, a boiled pokelogan crane she’d shot herself the evening prior, he grabbed his emerald windbreaker, the one he’d prized so heavily when it was new three years ago but which he now threw on casually whenever he anticipated the threat of a chill outdoors— and the local summers were famously fickle— flung on the high-seated, canvas rucksack he hauled everywhere, and popped out the door with a wispy goodbye to Dierdre.

After soliciting his neighbor Cloa to check in on the house while he was out, he made quick work of the journey to the Caboose, but when he opened the door to the place, the hinges announcing his presence like killdeer in retreat, and stepped into the smoky pallor, Thomas, who well knew the only thing that ever brought Liss into his establishment, glanced over in confusion.

If Helen wasn’t there, he knew where she was.

The hike to the mine was half an hour from the house, maybe twenty minutes from the Caboose, the large paved road lined with the nature which had begun encroaching as soon as DP closed shop, the near-constant clatter and rumble of iron wagons now replaced by the irregular footfalls of the few miners left after the dissolution of the Guild, those willing to enter the caves to dig solo, scavenging the mess left in DP’s wake— among them Helen, Ansel, and of course, Anita Bader, whose previous position had siphoned to her closely-held information about where concentrations of precious stones might still be harvested and where the most haunting dangers of the deep might be avoided, the dangers which loomed in his thoughts as he crossed the husky Wandelm Bridge, the warring rapids beneath him and town proper now behind.

There was one definite danger, the one that Liss believed had sent Ansel, once he’d managed to chop with his shovel through the tissues that were holding the remains of his lower leg onto the rest of his body, and once he’d tied his shirt around the wound as tightly as he had once tied his shirt around the almost identical wound of his friend Mart Wagner— who to this day would tell anyone if it looked like they would ask that he could feel the unearthly chill of death clawing at him in that mine, even before the attack, and that though he missed the use of the leg, he was content to limp around the humming coffee shop he now owned downtown, the warm pulse of the place like a shield. That day, too, it was Liss who had appeared like a bird in the dusky light, having left Helen at home, sick with a pregnancy that would terminate itself days later, Dierdre, her illness still in infancy, busily caretaking. When he found him, Ansel was just conscious, having climbed upward and upward toward the purpling twilight which he couldn’t see but which he knew was there, now silently shaping his breath around his wife’s name as he gazed up to where the Star of Relief hung like a beetle on a wall.

As he reached the entrance to the mine, Liss was haunted also by the shadowy existence of the other dangers, the myths that lined the games of his childhood: iridescent dragons, teleporting automata, massive trolls with sickle-like fangs. He and the other neighborhood children would shriek with laughter as they chased each other in circles around the yard, but one by one, they all peeled off at some point, either because they outgrew the game or because a family member would come home with a story that leeched the fun from their play— real monsters devouring the pretend ones.

Before he descended the wooden ramp to the mouth of the mineshaft, Liss rustled in the waning light through the modest pile of discarded gear, remnants of the failed strike that precipitated DP’s final decision to withdraw from the town. He uncovered a short-shafted shovel to suit his stature and an oil lantern that wasn’t completely empty of fuel. Suspecting that he was as prepared as he was likely to get in the time he had, he turned to make for the entrance when he caught a familiar shape in his peripheral: an iron helmet with a prominent band of gold around the base and another running vertically down the center, ending in a thick nose guard, the repurposed soldier’s helm of Deep Hilliard, which she had slammed onto the heap despite the fact that she could easily have packed up and followed DP south— she had no roots here; after leaving life as a mid-level royal guard in the capital city to “rediscover” herself, she had found within a mammoth of a woman with a flair for humor and spectacle who could be happy anywhere, with anyone— and she struck with the rest of them. Unfortunately, her contribution, though it solidified the affection her colleagues felt for her, did nothing to sway the board members, who knew there would be strong arms and backs in any town they chose. It was Deep who had eulogized Ansel when the time came, moving the attendees to laughter, to tears, to spells of quiet introspection.

Liss grabbed the helmet for himself and headed in.

It was perhaps fifty feet in that the tunnel swerved right, eliminating the last rays of the sunset and leaving the soft glow of the little lantern, which Liss had lit with the eternal flame that DP had installed outside the mine as a memorial to fallen workers— an empty gesture, Ansel made it a point of saying— as the sole guide into the darkness. He used the shovel like a walking stick with his left hand, his right holding the lantern aloft, out of his direct vision, and he felt the ground angle downward, subtly at first but then dramatically, leading him into the main shaft, the heart of the whole operation, from which arteries spidered off in a hundred directions. He could remember the descriptions Ansel and Helen had given at the dinner table, could almost picture in his mind the daunting structure looming before him, but the darkness was more complete than he had known, his light like a single firefly in a black field which he cast from side to side in vain, and he realized only now how foolish it had been to rush here by himself, he, Liss, who had no desire to dig, who spun yarn between shoe repairs just for the thin scritch of the fabric between his fingers, who napped on blankets in the grass at midday just to know the sun better; he was here now, alone, surrounded by the unforgiving rock and the zealous dark, and he had not thought to ask for help beyond someone to tend to Dierdre should she have an episode— had not thought to tell Cloa or Thomas where he was going, had not thought even when requisitioning a helmet for his purpose that Deep herself would have been infinitely better suited for the task.

He cried a little now and considered whether he should turn around, whether the wasted time of traveling to town again and back could be the difference between life and death for his sister. His tears blurred the dim light, and as he reached with his shovel hand to wipe them away, he stepped and skidded on a loose stone; he tried to right himself with the shovel but, already in motion and misjudging the angle, did nothing for himself as he crashed onto his tailbone, dropping the lantern, which exploded on the rock, and slid forward, shouting his sister’s name a single time, over the lip of the path and down, freefalling twenty or more feet, where he thudded feet-first onto the unforgiving walkway below, collapsing immediately.

Stunned but conscious, he noticed vaguely that the right leg of his trousers was flickering orange, and though he tried to rub it in the dirt, the leg remained immobile. By the time he had succeeded through great effort in rocking his body back and forth until the fire was out, and with the fire, his only remaining light, the waves of pain that were initially muted came rolling in: his side; his arms; his leg, of course; even his protected head. He had no thought of what to do next— in fact, he found himself thinking backwards: to the fall, to the false step, to the swindlers who went from mining town to mining town hawking serums and potions promising to speed digging or to slow falls; no elixir could have lowered him to the ground like a baby anymore than one could lift him back up to the ledge from which he had tumbled— no thought except to stay put, perhaps to die there or perhaps to be discovered the next day or the next week by another solo miner, but they were so rare these days— it was only through his business that he knew a handful by name— that holding such hope felt like a waste of energy here in this lightless oubliette.

He heard movement.

It was difficult to pinpoint with the echoes and without a sense of the chamber’s geography. Looking around vainly, he called his sister’s name in excitement and was answered by a clawing grip on the foot of his broken leg, accompanied by a piercing pain and followed by a sudden, powerful jerk, and then by another, and he felt himself being scraped across the ground by a brute dragger mole— a thick-coated, rodent-like creature nearly his own size that subsisted primarily on the abundant cave spiders but that was known to scavenge bigger game when available. His shoe leather shredded under the work of the teeth as he was pulled along for several minutes into a cramped tunnel, where his repeated jabs with the shovel finally succeeded in scaring the thing off, and he yawped and clanged the blade on the ground as it shuffled off into the blackness.

And then he crumpled in pain and exhaustion and anxiety and self-loathing. No one would have ever chosen Liss for this task, and he reeled now at having chosen himself. The half-reclusive boy who worked with his hands, not with his arms; who didn’t prize the impromptu competitions of strength often held in the square; who when surrounded by men didn’t participate in the comparison of sexual exploits— had anyone else suspected Helen were down here, they would have hurried off without so much as extending to him an invitation to watch. He would have been left behind. He was left behind now, the whole town lurching forward without him.

Ansel came to his mind. He had managed to escape the mine by dint of an otherworldly strength, but Liss has failed him as well, arriving only in time to see his frantic, unperceiving eyes go blank, alone in spite of Liss’s presence. He thought of Dierdre, whose electric mind and body had devolved ever faster after he had to increase his cobbling hours to shore up the household income.

And now Helen.

Finally, he thought again, longingly, of himself, the self he wanted to be but wasn’t and now never could be. The Baders would roll into town soon, and he would remain unknown to the whole family.

He closed his eyes, and dark went to dark, and though the guitbox was far away and he struggled to find the right notes without the strings to guide his voice, he sang the song he had composed, and he sang not to his love but to his sister. 

Memories flowed in him like oxygen, and he recalled their kindred childhood, playing knights in the wood shop ruins and trekking through the muck of the riverbed when the weather was dry and ornamenting the family fruit trees after the harvest; he recalled the ginger cake he baked to celebrate the news of the baby and the night he held her when the baby was lost; he recalled when she gave him his emerald jacket out of the blue, having saved for months, and he recalled how she was the only one to understand when he asked to be called Liss instead of Doug, the only one in his family to make the change without begrudging him.

His singing had never been enviable; his voice often cracked or pitched, or it warbled when he didn’t intend it to, or it dried out and became sandy, and it was all the rougher now for what had just befallen his body, but when he reached the chorus, his voice punched through the air like an awl:

_ If I let you down, _

_ Then still, like the sky finds the clouds, _

_ I know you’ll find me _

When he finished, he felt his breathlessness, and he felt a new lifelessness as he realized his sister was somewhere, gone. He lay still.

He lay still for a long while, the song slinking through his head again and again.

His eyes were still closed an hour later, but the deep blackness beyond his eyelids was now glowing blue, and when it registered, he found there was no confusion— he sensed his sister’s presence— and there was no surprise when he opened his eyes to find bright blue rays of light emanating from an invisible source just feet in front of him. 

The myths, the deep myths, not the childhood games, but the ones that even the temples operating in the background of Liss’s awareness ignored, the ones catalogued in the basements of bookstores and libraries, spoke of the Bright Spirits, a person’s light left behind if it is connected closely enough to someone still living, a light said to heal or guide or possess, either feared or revered, depending on who was asked. Liss believed Helen’s Bright Spirit was shining before him there in the cave. She’d found him.

When he reached for the light, it flickered and shuddered, and he watched as it shrank into a single point and dashed downward into a plate-sized rock, a moonstone, he could see, which then glowed the same sky blue, muted, but enough to see by.

Renewed with hope, Liss picked up the rock and, after painfully removing his rucksack, placed it inside, leaving the top flap open to allow some light into the cave. He pulled off his right shoe, which was shredded beyond recognition, and using the shovel as a crutch, hobbled out of the tunnel and saw the ladder he had careened over earlier. Muscles sore, shovel gripped in his left hand, feet uneven, he hauled himself up the wall, and when he collapsed in pain and fatigue at the mine’s opening, he saw her, Hera the Star of Relief, grinning in the east.

He fell asleep but was woken minutes later by Deep Hilliard’s hand on his forehead. She had removed the helmet which had stubbornly remained on his head throughout the ordeal, and she was saying words to him, but they were swimming by. In his side vision, he saw others, and when he felt he could, he looked around to find Thomas and Mart and their families, Cloa’s wife and their granddaughter, and what looked to be dozens of others who were foregoing the biggest social event of the season to check on Liss, to ensure his well-being.

Though he could barely move, he could feel the imprint of the large, flat stone pressing into his back, and he took a first moment to mourn Helen’s loss and to appreciate that some part had returned. And in that moment, the news having reached the Bader caravan, their wagons pulled up, iced with lacquer and shining under the moon, and he saw his love, stepping down, looking over with concern.


End file.
